VMware Explore: VMware Tanzu Supercharges Portfolio to Help Customers Build/Run/Manage Cloud-Native Apps

Enterprises are under increasing pressure to digitize their businesses by modernizing app development and IT operations, as traditional approaches simply cannot deliver the competitive advantages or rapid innovation that businesses need.

Developers and IT teams must adapt to the cloud-native app development reality because, in a world where organizations are defined by the digital services they can deliver, modern applications aren’t just the backbone of digital transformation, they’re the currency of this digital economy.

At VMware Explore 2022, VMware, Inc. was introducing advances to its Tanzu portfolio – Tanzu Application Platform and Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – that unlock developer productivity, deliver end-to-end security from build to production, and enable secure multi-cloud operations at scale, regardless of where they are in their Kubernetes journey.

“Companies face pressure to optimize their application development and delivery efforts for speed, resilience, and security as they move to become a true digital enterprise. Platform teams must focus on delivering a great developer experience and path to production to speed velocity, while also providing a solution for deploying and running apps more securely, reliably, and at scale on any and many clouds,” said Ajay Patel, SVP and GM, modern apps and management business group, VMware. “Whether our customers are starting from the data center with existing apps or new apps built in the cloud, VMware Tanzu meets them where they are so they can get their apps to production faster. For those just starting their Kubernetes journey, vSphere with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid helps you get a developer ready platform. For those who have already started with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or any Kubernetes distribution, they can use Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations and Tanzu Application Platform for scaling your operator and developer experience.”

How customers are benefitting from Tanzu?
Tanzu is now being adopted by customers across the cloud, edge, and data centers, as they are looking for consistent Kubernetes development, delivery, and management of their highly distributed environments.

“Tanzu Application Platform gives us the flexibility to leverage new tools from a broad ecosystem of native cloud services, while still allowing us to gain value from our existing investments – all within a single, secure, modular platform,” says Ganesh Venkataraman, CTO, digital transformation, Fiserv. “It enables us to focus on delivering customer value without worrying about application dependencies or changing code to deliver on our multi-cloud strategy and application portability requirements. This keeps our teams agile and lets us quickly adapt to customer needs. We’re just scratching the surface with Tanzu Application Platform and look forward to adopting Application Accelerator and customizing our secure software supply chain as our needs evolve.”

The company’s State of Kubernetes report ⁽¹⁾ found that 65% of organizations already run Kubernetes in production, and 48% expect to expand their adoption over the next year. Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations is the foundation for building and operating a modern container infrastructure at scale across any Kubernetes and any cloud. According to new data commissioned by Enterprise Strategy Group ⁽²⁾, Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations delivers 70-80% less administrative cost across all Kubernetes operations, 58% reduction in response time, and 3x to 5x faster time to value for customers, simplifying and better securing Kubernetes operations for modern applications.

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations

Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations adds capabilities to help streamline and secure Kubernetes deployments at scale across clouds
The company continues to meet customers wherever they are in their journey of adopting Kubernetes infrastructure – whether a single team, a single cloud, or operating enterprise-wide in multi-cloud – they are relying on Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations to establish the right foundation and set up an environment for the complete development to production lifecycle. At VMware Explore 2022, the firm was announcing updates to key components in Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations – Tanzu Mission Control, VMware Aria Operations for Apps (formerly Tanzu Observability by Wavefront), and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid – to simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability. Kubernetes Grid – to simplify Kubernetes delivery, management, and reliability.

Tanzu Mission Control expands multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes management capabilities

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As part of the company’s continued commitment to supporting customers at every stage of their Kubernetes infrastructure maturity, Tanzu Mission Control is announcing several features that extend and optimize multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management capabilities:

• Preview for lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters: Tanzu Mission Control will enable direct provisioning and management of Amazon EKS clusters so that developers and operators will have less friction and more choices for cluster types. DevOps teams will be able to simplify multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management with centralized lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Amazon EKS cluster types. 

• Integration with VMware Aria Automation: Mission Control is now integrated with VMware Aria Automation, formerly known as VMware vRealize Automation Cloud, to help customers consolidate their IaaS and Kubernetes platform operations. This integration enables operators to design cloud infrastructure and underlying services, on any vSphere-based or public cloud and also deploy Kubernetes clusters directly via Aria Automation while simplifying management at scale by inheriting Tanzu Mission Control policies through its cluster groups and complying to VMware Aria Automation rules and constraints.

• Continuous and consistent cluster lifecycle management via GitOps: Tanzu Mission Control users can now employ clusters via GitOps for consistent Kubernetes cluster configuration. This feature provides a method for managing cluster configurations with Tanzu Mission Control via continuous delivery from a Git repository. Continuous delivery through Tanzu Mission Control is built on Flux CD and enables users to attach a Git repository to a cluster and sync YAML artifacts from the repository to the cluster which can introduce consistency to the GitOps toolchain.

• Application reliability with cross-cluster backup and restore: Kubernetes application operators can now have more flexibility for their applications with Tanzu Mission Control cross-cluster backup and restore. This feature enables application operators to move applications between any cluster, running on any cloud, or on-prem data center for improved application resiliency and simplified site recovery. 

Introducing unified observability by VMware Aria Operations for applications
As enterprises modernize their existing application portfolio and build new cloud-native applications, the need for application and Kubernetes log management at scale will continue to grow. The company’s new Unified Observability Platform by Aria Operations for Applications, formerly Tanzu Observability, provides simplified full-stack visibility with great user-experience, and predictable pricing for multi-cloud environments. The Unified Observability platform amplifies existing capabilities with the addition of log management to deliver contextual data across traces, metrics, and logs enabling more actionable insights and reducing MTTR (mean-time-to-resolution) at a massive scale. The platform unifies data, insights, and actions across IT, and offers customized and out-of-the-box dashboards for applications, with more than 250 vendor integrations to start capturing real-time data from any stack in minutes, eliminating data silos, war rooms, and alert fatigue. 

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0 streamlines Kubernetes and application lifecycle management

With containers being deployed increasingly on-premises, in public cloud, and at the edge, it is essential for standardization of Kubernetes across these environments. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is engineered to simplify installation and Day 2 operations by packaging together key open-source technologies and automation tooling to help teams get up and running quickly. The firm is introducing Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0, designed to help IT teams and developers with a streamlined experience for managing and provisioning the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters. New capabilities add flexibility and control for cluster creation with Cluster Class, open-source API alignment, application lifecycle management capabilities, and Carvel-based tooling. It is tightly integrated with and embedded in vSphere 8, allowing customers to transform their existing compute infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment across clouds. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid now also supports smaller cluster sizes of a single control node and a single worker node, available in VMware Edge Compute Stack 2.0, bringing simplicity and scale to the Enterprise Edge. add flexibility and control for cluster creation with Cluster Class, open-source API alignment, application lifecycle management capabilities, and Carvel-based tooling. It is tightly integrated with and embedded in vSphere 8, allowing customers to transform their existing compute infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment across clouds. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid also supports smaller cluster sizes of a single control node and a single worker node, available in Edge Compute Stack 2.0, bringing simplicity and scale to the Enterprise Edge.

Tanzu Application Platform adds capabilities to improve developer productivity and simplify DevSecOps
The company’s customers with a cloud-native applications strategy are looking to Tanzu Application Platform as a value stream platform to manage complexity in building, configuring, connecting, and deploying new apps with a secure path to production. Tanzu Application Platform is designed to unlock developer productivity by providing Application Accelerators and a pre-paved path to production with all the needed components preconfigured for developer teams to build and deploy software quickly and securely. At VMware Explore 2022, the firm is pre-announcing new capabilities in the Tanzu Application Platform that further enhance developer and application operator experiences for any Kubernetes environment, increase supply chain security, and offer additional ecosystem integrations.

Updates include:

• Availability on RedHat OpenShift: To give increased flexibility to our customers regarding their Kubernetes platform choice, Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 will be available on RedHat OpenShift, running in vSphere and on bare metal. Leverage your existing investment in RedHat OpenShift to realize the value of Tanzu Application Platform. 

• Air-gap support: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 is available for regulated and disconnected environments with the addition of air-gapped installation, helping to ensure that components, upgrades, and patches are made available to the system and that they operate consistently and correctly in the controlled environment – in addition to keeping the organization’s data more secure at all times. 

• Secure software supply chain enhancements: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 shifts security left with 3 new capabilities that increase efficiency across dev and ops and accelerates the path to productions:

  • The platform expands the ecosystem of supported vulnerability scanners with a beta integration with VMware Carbon Black scanner (in addition to Snyk and Grype) to enable customer choice and leverage their existing investments in securing their supply chain. 

  • A new, centralized vulnerability monitoring dashboard will aid app teams with their pre-deployment security checks and secure app deployments. 

  • Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) support for SPDX in addition to CycloneDX to give teams choice in how they import and export SBoMs via the Tanzu insight CLI plug-in.

• Dynamic API spec registration: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 automates the experience in publishing, consuming, and collaborating on APIs for application development. Integration of the Backstage API Docs plugin into the Tanzu Application Platform GUI now auto-registers and publishes the workload specification through a secure supply chain to the API catalog with role-based access control settings. 

• Jenkins CI/CD integration: Tanzu Application Platform 1.3 extends the ability for users to leverage existing Jenkins pipelines in Tanzu Application Platform with deeper Jenkins integrations. The integration will allow the Jenkins CI component to be used as part of an out of the box supply chain ​to manage specific steps in the overall CI/CD pipeline​, and to automate triggering of Jenkins jobs from Tanzu Application Platform supply chains. 

Cross-cloud services helps customers navigate multi-cloud era
At VMware Explore 2022, the company was unveiling new and enhanced offerings for Cross-Cloud services to help customers navigate the multi-cloud era with freedom, flexibility and security. Cross-Cloud services is a portfolio of cloud services that deliver a unified and simplified way to build, operate, access, and secure any application on any cloud from any device. Cross-Cloud service pillars include 1) App Platform 2) Cloud Management 3) Cloud and Edge Infrastructure 4) Security and Networking, and 5) Anywhere Workspace.

⁽¹⁾ The State of Kubernetes, March 2022, Vmware (registration required)
⁽²⁾ ESG Research: Bottom line benefits of VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, Enterprise Strategy Group, June 2022